David Chipperfield is standing in the lobby of the Folkwang Museum in Essen. Outside, thousands of people are queuing in snow that is turning to driving sleet. Germans might love their museums, particularly here in the Ruhr valley, but this is some queue. What are they here for? Well, there's the building and its art, of course. But the big draw is also the chance to see a museum that was looted by the Nazis, destroyed by the Allies, awkwardly rebuilt in the 1980s – and now brought back to vigorous, elegant life, by a British architect who has been spending a lot of his time restoring the German skyline.

"Art has no greater enemy than the architect," says the newly knighted Chipperfield, eyeing the queue. This, he adds with a smile, is a quote from the late great art critic David Sylvester. "In recent years, art galleries have tended to become freak shows. It's been all about the wackiness of the buildings and not enough about the art." He points to the Folkwang's serene vista of glazed galleries, gleaming amid all the polished concrete and grey steel, and set around a grid of courtyards. "Here, art comes first: you don't have to walk more than a few steps to find it."

What riles Chipperfield is the ruthless commercialism that has taken over the construction process in recent years, leading to so many banal, cheapskate buildings, especially in Britain, where the aim seems to be to deliver as much covered space as possible on the cheap, rounded off with a headline-stealing roof. It's no coincidence that Chipperfield has produced three of his best new buildings in Germany: the Folkwang; the exquisitely proportioned Museum of Modern Literature, perched on a rock plateau in Marbach, in 2006; and the Neues Museum in Berlin, another building shattered during the war and stunningly restored, which opened last year.

A little Margate magic

Indeed, Chipperfield's knighthood is for his services to architecture both in the UK and in Germany, the latter being, by and large, a country still as committed to high-quality architecture as it is to sturdy cars and gleaming trains. The Folkwang, which houses an impressive art collection, is an emphatically ­modern building. With its single-storey structure, ceiling-to-floor windows, its horizontal lines, free-flowing plan and painstakingly crafted structure, this is Chipperfield's homage to Mies van der Rohe, the great German modernist whose crystal-clear buildings set a standard for a form of architectural purism that has never been surpassed.

"Britain loves a bargain," says Chipperfield, "but you don't get good, lasting architecture on the cheap. If you look at a building by Mies van der Rohe, it might look very simple, but up close, the sheer quality of construction, materials and thought are inspirational."

Chipperfield's unwillingness to ­compromise has not always made him friends in Britain, where highly crafted modern buildings are the exception. It is something of myth, however, to say he gets no work here. He is currently working on the Hepworth Wakefield sculpture gallery in Yorkshire; the Turner Contemporary, a shiny, ­angular structure that promises to light up the Margate skyline; and a major refit for the Royal Academy in London. The Turner, in particular, shows how well Chipperfield is able to adapt his rigorous designs to every environment, even something as cherished and unchanging as an English seaside town. Towering over the waves like a modern fort, the gallery will offer ravishing views of the sea that so inspired the painter.

Such projects have taken some while to come through, though. Chipperfield, born in London in 1953 and trained at the Architectural Association, first made his reputation in Japan in the 1980s. What has made him successful, albeit slowly, is his dedication to quality, ideas, and the craft of building: he teaches ­architecture as well as practising it, and ran an architectural gallery called 9H, named after the hardest kind of pencil. (It was created to bring wider attention to what were then obscure European firms, such as Herzog and de Meuron.)

Our in-flight magazine culture

Bold yet graceful, full of impact yet ­devoid of tricks, Chipperfield's architecture could point the way ahead in a new age of austerity, as we move away from the wily architectural excesses of the noughties. It is hard not to see the Folkwang as a reprimand to Chipperfield's home country, especially when the architect warms to his theme. "In Britain, we've tended to replace the kind of architectural culture valued in much of ­Europe with an in-flight magazine lifestyle – all branding, marketing and 'accessibility', a word that usually means dumbing-down. We treat people, even those willing to trek to museums and art galleries in the snow, as if they don't know anything about ­anything, when it's just not true.

"We pride ourselves on a system of planning in Britain known as 'development control' – as if we're talking about pest control, rather than ways of ­making our towns and cities more interesting places. Most architects work in ­studios largely divorced from academia, as if ideas, criticism and ­historical ­research were irrelevant. And we have little or no way of encouraging young architects, who should be winning design competitions for public buildings. We don't have city ­architects, or local-authority architects' departments, up and down Britain as you do in Europe, so there's no reliable way of encouraging competitions and making them work. It's as if any decent new architecture in Britain happens more by accident than design."

As if to prove his point, Chipperfield, back in his London studio, shows me a website that collates all the new ­competitions open to architects across Europe. There are many on the continent, few in Britain. Those on the mainland are all marked with an asterisk. What does that mean? "They are design competitions, meaning they want an architect to work all the way through a project; those without just want an architect to produce a set of drawings for planning permission. They can get lost as the development process takes over."

The German press – universally, it appears – likes what Chipperfield has done here. Some 300 German journalists attended last week's opening, and they weren't all from high-minded broadsheets: the building also ­received lavish attention from the tabloids. "I even won a culture award from Berlin's BZ," says Chipperfield, "which is like the Sun or the Sport handing out prizes for modern architecture."